home is where you are
by Just the Wind
Summary: The stars show the world's heroes and villains and these stories don't ever change. If you listen really carefully, you can hear them whispering "give up now, you'll always be what you always were." A Next-Gen drabble collection, different couples and stories each time. So far: Victoire, Molly, Lucy, Lorcan.
1. Victoire

Word count: 190

He thinks of her in black and white film. A beautiful girl, a smoky room, darkness and fog outside, the alleys of Paris dimly lit by flickering lamps. Ashes from a cigarette litter the floor and her eyes are rimmed with kohl. Her hair is short and dark and her dress clings in the right places and skates right over her slender form just where it's supposed to.

She exhales and the illusion fades away.

"I don't believe in love," she tells him and he can imagine her, wrapped in mink and diamonds, simpering or smoldering or whatever it is that beautiful girls with dark eyes and hair and hearts do.

"Of course you don't," he responds and he knows only two things: she never will and he'll never stop trying to change her mind.

She grips his hand for the briefest minute, a silent apology for being the way she is, and he thinks she might actually understand what she's doing to him but she lets go far too soon and he realizes she has no clue. She might not believe in love, but he's fallen hopelessly for her.


	2. Molly

**I pictured this with Molly, but it could really be anyone. I like Molly for it, though, or Dom.**

**Word Count: 221**

She is so used to trying not to fall in love.

It's been three months and sixteen years and she's weathered every storm that's come to ravage her life. She's heard confessions and seen murders and fallen in love with the idea of love without actually falling in love. She's insisted on being herself as often as she's insisted on changing herself and both happen so frequently she's not sure who she is anymore.

She'd say she's pretty bad at running but that'd be a blatant lie. She does a lot of that, both lying and running. Her mouth can curl into the perfect almost genuine, almost picture perfect, almost believable smile at any time and she can whisper a thousand untruths and maybe only get caught for one. And she can run. For a girl with asthma that makes her lungs burn, she can run so fast only the wind can touch her as she goes by.

She's good at avoiding people and questions and pretending to be indestructible when she's really as fragile as a single snowflake.

And she's so used to trying not to fall in love that it takes her completely by surprise when she does.

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	3. Lucy

**Oh Lucy, Lucy, Lucy. One of my favorite characters to have the privilege to write. Lucy's innocent and wild and intelligent and rebellious and romantic, or at least I think she is, so this drabble really threatened to go everywhere. **

**Warning: just a little bit of bad language is used. Don't read if that's going to offend you.**

**Word count: 270.**

"I hate you!"

And they're kissing and she thinks that it's so infuriating that he's making her knees weak and her cheeks flush, so she pushes him away and slaps him across the face and screams again, "I hate you!" and maybe if she screams a little louder, she'll start to believe it.

She's Lucy Weasley and life's been handed to her on a silver platter but she's Lucy fucking Weasley, so she's pushed away the platter and laughed as it clattered to the floor.

He's the boy with sharp eyes and a soft tongue and he's built himself a throne in books and scrolls while she's still busy running from the golden crown that's been situated on her head since birth. And she hates that he had to work for it all and she didn't, but she can't blame herself for that so she decides to blame him.

"I hate you!"

"You don't mean that,"

And they're kissing again but this time she's the one who leaned forward and it's actually not bad, so much so that it's rather incredible and she wonders if his face still smarts from the slap.

She whispers "I love you," and it doesn't need to be said any louder, she already believes it.

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	4. Lorcan

**This is what happens when I read Neruda's poetry. Let me know if you understand at all what is going on, because I'm not 100% sure I do.  
**

If you're really quiet, sometimes you can hear the stars talk. You have to be almost silent, though, which is why most people don't know what they have to say.

Her skin feels like rustling leaves and her breath tastes like peppermint as it licks his ear with a hundred thousand promises and one question.

He doesn't know what to say, the constellations like each love anyone has ever had orbiting in the sky. And maybe that's tragic because stars are so infinitely stretched across time and space but maybe it's also a little happy because they're there for eons and can be seen from light-years away.

Her fingers light trails of embers down his spine and into the pit of his stomach where his whole being simmers as he waits for her lips to crash down, the tide of her love turned in his favor, the moons giving him a spot of luck.

She smells like seafoam and is made of skin, bones, and coffee grounds. But the sound of her hands in his is deafening and he can't help but miss the softness of lavender and resent the grit of sandpaper. The coolness of rivers he'd trade any day for sparks and fireworks.

He is really quiet and hears what she's saying and what the stars are saying and then, it what seems like no time at all but really could've been centuries, he's lightyears away with one hundred curses stinging his lips.

The new girl, all linen and chocolate, thyme and moon doesn't follow, but he didn't expect her to anyway.

The stars show the world's heroes and villains and these stories don't ever change. If you listen really carefully, you can hear them whispering "give up now, you'll always be what you always were." And you'll be silent a little longer because they're more right than the feeling of fingers tangled in your hair.


	5. Lily

**I've been writing a lot lately, actually, but it's all college app work. Not that it's not fiction (well, most isn't) and not that it's not prosey (all of it is. Plain narratives are for suckers), but I can't share it online because of obvious reasons. Anywho, I wrote this to fill my writing portfolio but it totally got away from me, so you all get it. **

**Word count: 506**

**her knuckles are white from hanging on far too tight**

She wonders if you can wear holes through words the way she has with her favorite shoes, so beaten and bruised into conforming submission that they no longer squeak in complaint as she forces them down marble halls. The question, in her mind, is if she can keep talking and talking and if she'll ever use up a reservoir of words and suddenly be left with a dry mouth and nothing more to say. The real question is what would happen if she went silent. She doesn't know how to ask that and she doesn't know how to answer it, so she'll beg a response from the wrong people for the wrong problem, words spilling from her mouth so quickly that she can feel them filling her lungs.

This is drowning in existence and it sounds overly important and overly terrifying, but the scariest bit of it all is its silence, you'd never know it was coming.

She wonders if she can think herself out of this mind, this moving-too-fast mind, this jumping-to-conclusions mind, this mind that's far too old for her young soul. She tries to think about the notion of thinking, but gives up and wallows instead.

They say that this is being a teenager. That you're only young when you toss "I love you"s like dimes on a sidewalk and youth is in the solidarity of feeling alone, together. She doesn't buy that, but maybe that's because all the change that was once in her pockets litters the streets from all the boys she's ever lied to.

She thinks she should wear a warning sign around her neck. A cardboard that says "Beware, I am toxic. Beware, I'll tell you I have asthma and then run faster than the wind for the hills." Or maybe it should say, "Beware, I like to pretend my shoulders are made of iron but I'm constructed out of glass, actually. So if you break me, be sure to sweep the shards under a rug so they do not bloody the feet of the next fool to tread my way." But really it would say, "to all the boys I will ever say I love, I'm sorry."

Her shoes have holes in them and her pockets are empty. Her head is bowed with the weight of the sign around her neck and she keeps gasping for air like she can't catch a breath. This is youth. She opens her mouth but there are no words because sometimes that's just the way life goes, so she closes her lips and her eyes and pretends that she can get some sleep.


End file.
